She needed space. In the immediate aftermath of Ben’s wedding announcement, she applied to and was accepted at Stanford for a Knight Journalism Fellowship. The year in Palo Alto surrounded by smart strangers who knew nothing of Ben or her parents served as the perfect palate cleanser for her personal life and a boost to her professional life. The job at Straight Up was a leap for her on all levels, and she took it with confidence when she returned to DC. She wasn’t a done deal, she knew that.

The DNA test kit was sitting there on her mantel. It was New Year’s Eve and, in the two weeks since the office party, she’d discovered that Dean, the great guy she’d met in a bar at Reagan Airport one foggy night, was actually happily married and not in the middle of a messy divorce as he’d said. Feeling down, she’d waved off every invitation from her single colleagues to attend overpriced prix fixe dinners at restaurants and all the invitations to small get-togethers hosted by her married-with-children friends who were going to ring in the New Year at nine, instead of midnight, a phenomenon Serena thought was too precious to indulge. She was leaving for an obligatory three days in Hobe Sound the next morning.

The DNA kit seemed like a positive, slightly provocative way to start the new year. Maybe she’d get a story out of it, at least, a personal essay she would submit to the Times or a magazine.

Six weeks later, when the email arrived in Serena’s inbox about her possible genetic matches, she actually laughed at the subject line: Want to

meet more Tuckers? They’re out there. No thanks, she didn’t want to meet any more Tuckers. Her parents were enough Tuckers in her life, she thought.

When she clicked the link and spotted that she had matched with a Sweeney from Southport, she sat frozen at her desk, hoping her colleagues didn’t notice. Almost paralyzed, like she’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart. As the feeling returned to her body, it spread like a warm wave of relief. Serena had felt like a fake inside her own skin for as long as she could remember.

Even though she had inherited her mother’s coloring and took after her father in terms of disposition, she felt disconnected from Birdie and Mitchell Tucker in a way she couldn’t describe until now. She grabbed her stuff and fled the office, needing to walk off the chaos surging through her veins.

If Serena had a husband or a tight group of girlfriends, she would have texted them: WTF, William Sweeney is my father. But she had no one close enough to share her monumental secret, so she whispered it to herself as she walked in a frantic pace to the National Mall to work out the panic in her head.

The fact that she was William Sweeney’s daughter and not Mitchell Tucker’s daughter explained so much to her. The loneliness of her childhood, the restlessness of her college years, and the joy she found in a newsroom, being part of a team working to uncover the truth. When Serena discovered writing during high school, she felt like she’d unlocked a secret door that her parents didn’t even try to understand. (“If I were you, I’d take a few accounting classes along with all the literature,” Mitch Tucker had warned as they dropped her off at Vassar.) Now writing, her secret door, connected her to William Sweeney, the William Sweeney.

As Serena walked to the Washington Monument and back to the Lincoln Memorial, she tried to come to grips with the revelations: that her mother had had an affair, that her parents had lied to her for decades, that maybe her father had no idea that Serena wasn’t his, that she had an entire family out there who didn’t know she existed. And what if the results couldn’t be trusted? Then again, what were the chances that her neighbor’s name from Southport would pop up? Serena had only used her Washington, DC, address. The company would never have known that she’d been neighbors with the Sweeneys. Serena decided to approach this revelation like she would any story—do the research, formulate the questions, track down the key interviews, and then write the story as truthfully as possible.

For the next two months, Serena worked at Straight Up by day and at night at home on what she started to call Project Prodigal. Once she satisfied her skepticism that the DNA test might be bogus (it wasn’t), she read everything she could by and about Bill Sweeney, including his memoir My Maeve, which gave her insight into what was really happening on Willow Lane during the years when the gardens went untended and the nursing care came around the clock. It was clear from the title and the text that William Sweeney had little idea about what Liza, Maggie, and Tricia were going through during and after their mother’s death. She felt sorry for them, for her sisters.

She searched for any reference, in his fiction or memoir, to Birdie Tucker, finding only one reference in Million Zillion, his least successful novel, published in 1998, that a Kirkus review described as “a wan Wall Street satire that recycles the cynicism of Bitter Fruit without any of the humanity.” (Bill Sweeney wouldn’t write another book for seven years after the lackluster reception and sales.) In Million Zillion, the protagonist, a corrupt but dynamic banker who turns himself in to the FBI, is married to a character named Wren, described as “an Amazonian blonde, a slender cypher who exists on gin and tonics and vitriol and the belief that appearances must be maintained at all costs.” Ultimately, Wren abandons her sexy jailbird husband for a quiet and serene life on the Maine coast remarried to an accountant. Serena recognized Wren was Birdie Tucker.

Brutal. He sounds like a jilted lover, she thought, finding it impossible to believe that anyone of William Sweeney’s stature had ever felt that way about Birdie Tucker, Club Champion.

Serena weighed whether the conversation with her mother should be in person or over the phone. The only benefit to an in-person confrontation, and she was sure it would be a confrontation, was to have the satisfaction of having the upper hand, if even for an instant, but having to make conversation with her father afterward negated any upside. Instead, she took the approach she often used with interview subjects she needed for background, an email first to set up a time including only vague information about the intention of the conversation, followed by a taped phone call on the record. Serena found this softened up potential subjects, so when she came at them with specifics, they caved quickly, not expecting the directness. She needed her mother to be honest and quick, because the last

thing she wanted was details. Serena and her mother didn’t have that kind of relationship and they never would.

After months of research and theories and daydreams of what her life might have been like had she known the truth for thirty-eight years instead of only the last five months, the conversation with her mother was short and simple, without apology or surprise. When the day arrived to make the call, Serena, who had interviewed dictators and drug lords, was terrified of her mother, scared to say the words out loud and make the accusation. But she found her voice: “I did a DNA test. It appears that Mitchell Tucker is not my biological father. Does that surprise you?”

It was like Birdie had been waiting for the moment; her voice was measured and calm. “I’ve come to believe that William Sweeney is your father. I never had any other children, so I assumed that your father couldn’t. But I never knew for sure until now and I’ve never told anyone.

Including your father. Mitchell. Dad.” Then, Birdie added, “It wasn’t my finest moment, Serena, and I’d appreciate it if we kept this between us. But, of course, that’s up to you. I understand that you can do what you wish with the information.”

Serena set up an appointment with Cap Richardson for the next week.

She wanted to meet her father, although she’d seen him dozens of times in the past. He was the local celebrity. When Bill Sweeney was around, people noticed. Serena had, for sure. At the neighborhood Christmas party.

Walking his dog down the lane and giving Serena a little nod and a quick word. She’d seen him at half a dozen library events, as he charmed the audience with his storytelling and humor. But she needed to talk to him in this new context. Serena wanted to meet her father, not the local celebrity.

Like any decent reporter, Serena knew she was sitting on a blockbuster story, maybe even a memoir of her own. Certainly, it was enough to get a publisher interested and that would be enough to get her out the door at Straight Up before it went under. She came to Southport to assess whether the truth would be worth telling to the world and what that would cost her in her life. She needed to understand what she might be losing and that involved the Sweeney sisters. Serena set to work investigating each of them. They each had a story to tell.